Names | Master - Philippians 2:9-11 | May 3

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Last week, as Miss Sandy reminded us,

we sat with a name of God that is perhaps one of the most divisive names of

God, one that we maybe wish or rather wish that God wouldn't have given himself

that name. and that name was jealous.

And we'd rather avoid jealousy and people over the years have avoided jealousy

because of our human understanding of what it means, our misconceptions that

we then read into God, that we see it as,

we see jealousy in our own lives as something that we need to apologize for,

that should be apologized for,

something that you should medicate for or go to therapy for or something like that, right?

So when we attribute it to God, we think of it as insecurity,

as fear, as losing control.

And so to us, jealousy seems small and petty and fragile.

And so when we get to verses like Exodus 34, where God says,

you shall worship no other God for the Lord whose name is jealous is a jealous

God. And God says his name is jealous.

We misunderstand that because we read all of our human understanding.

And John and Karen, I talked to them after the service last week,

and John was wondering if I knew off the top of my head, which I don't know

Hebrew that well, so I didn't have the answer for him.

But if the word jealous when talked about for God is a different word than the

sin of jealousy, and it actually kind of is, it's not a different word,

but it's a different version that when it shows up, that version is always used for God.

So there is this different aspect of God's jealousy where God is saying,

I'm not indifferent to your love. I'm not casual about your worship.

I will not share your heart with the things that destroy you.

So his jealousy is the jealousy of a husband who refuses to celebrate adultery

and keep the covenant sacred.

His jealousy is a jealousy of a father who refuses to let anything steal his

kids away from him, like addiction or all these other things,

these other false idols that we go after.

It's the jealousy of a creator who made for himself a people who made us.

And he knows that everything else that we try and settle for in our life,

that we run to, that we turn to, that we share our hearts with.

Everything else that's not him,

anything that's lesser than him is not going to satisfy us in the end.

It's not going to ultimately bring us true happiness, true joy.

So God is jealous, not because he's needy or experiences any of these.

Petty human emotions that we are so plagued with, but because he is love and

love refuses to stand by while his beloved us is given away to the things that

ruin them. So that was jealousy.

And as we've been kind of talking about through this whole series,

names in scripture are never accidental.

When God changes somebody's name, it's on purpose. And when he gives himself

a name, it means something special for us to pay attention to.

It reveals his character.

It's not limiting him, but it is revealing a bit of who he is.

And so that's, as we turn this week, that's what we're looking at again,

but this time through another name.

And the name, sort of Adonai, that's the Old Testament. We'll get into those

different names, but obviously I can't.

Have a big reveal because it's already on the screen, but through the name master.

And I'm going to kind of favor this interpretation, this translation of the

word rather than Lord, but I'll say Lord plenty of times as well.

Unlike jealousy. So we talked about some names and we'll get to probably some

of those in the future that aren't really named for God.

Although we call them names of God, like the Lord is provider.

It names a place, not God, but he is our provider.

Jealousy, we avoid because it's confusing and we don't really understand it.

This one, we don't avoid.

In fact, we sing it, we pray it, we write it down, we confess it easily. Jesus is Lord.

The Lord our God is ever faithful. We sing that song, right?

The Lord our God is ever faithful. So we use this name all the time.

And so what we've done instead of being offended by it, is what we've done over the years is soften it.

We soften this idea of what it means that God is our Lord. He is our master.

So we hear it. And what we think in our heads is that he is holy,

that he is majestic, that he is great, that he is exalted, that he is lifted up.

And certainly God is all of those things.

But when we use the word Lord, it doesn't mean that at all.

It doesn't mean it's not this title of honor.

It's not a way of saying that God is high and lifted up. Again, certainly that is true.

But it is not contained in this name itself.

The word Lord, the word master, Adonai or Kyrios in the Greek,

is the relationship of a master and its slave.

It means master, it means owner, it means possessor. Possessor,

it means one with authority.

So it is, in the New Testament, we'll see, depending on your translation,

a lot of the word translated as bond servant,

But it is this relationship that this word calls to mind and those who would

have read it as it was originally written.

Which means when we call God our Lord, when we call Jesus Lord,

what the biblical authors were intending for us to hear and what we should be

saying is, I do what he says.

This is the idea of that relationship. This is Lord. This is Adonai.

This is part of the reason why it's difficult for us to understand the true

meaning of the word Lord in our culture.

You might've heard the word worldview before, because what we're talking about

is what our worldview is, how we are raised, how we grow up.

The word is myth, this myth of power, origin, power, and destiny.

But that word myth is deceiving. It doesn't mean like fake things.

It just means the stories that shape us, right? So myths of origin,

power, destiny, that's your worldview.

That's how you interpret the world. And what we're really getting at is this

worldview question. So when you hear the word Lord, what immediately comes to mind for you?

Nobody's brave this morning. Medieval times. Okay.

Maybe like in our modern context, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Lorded over for sure. Yeah. The singer. Oh, yeah, but she's from New Zealand.

So that doesn't count. And it's with an E.

Anything else? Anything else come to mind? Those are good ones. Lorded over.

We think of what does a Lord today might, what might we think of England?

Sure. There's still Lords in England, but they can't do anything.

Yeah. So it's all shaped by the fact that 250 years ago, this is America's 250th

birthday apparently this year.

So 250 years ago or more, the entire world was ruled by monarchies and actual

ruling monarchy is not just figureheads, right?

And now fast forward, and there are only about 200 countries that exist today.

There are only about 10 functioning ruling monarchies. And so we have been on

this journey in a lot of ways.

It is the essence of what it means to be American is that if someone is over

you or someone is telling you what to do, or someone is lording it over you,

is that phrase, then what they're doing to you is limiting your freedom.

And we go all the way back to 1776. we have built our worldview and our national

identity on rejecting the very notion of a king and rejecting the very notion of a master over us.

If you dive down deep into the American imagination, what you find there in

this worldview is the conviction that freedom means no one rules over me.

And that's our culture. And it's so ingrained in us that we instinctively believe

that you cannot experience life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness if you

have a Lord or master. Thank you.

And what the Bible teaches us is the exact opposite is true.

That the only way to experience true freedom and true happiness is if God is our master.

So again, 200 years ago, 250 years ago, all monarchs today, what we decided,

what we traded essentially is instead of one idiot ruling over us,

we just wanted a bunch of idiots ruling over us.

I don't think it's as great of a trade, but we are profoundly uncomfortable

with this idea of sovereignty.

But Yahweh, the God of heaven, God of earth, who created everything,

his kingdom is not a democracy, which means that part of following Jesus is,

recovering something that our culture has trained us to resist.

That is that Jesus is not merely our savior. He's not merely a good teacher,

but that he is our Lord. He is our master.

He is, Jesus is king, which is a very charged word in our current political climate, right?

Probably getting to the point where it was as charged as it was when it was

really originally said that Jesus is king.

We have these college students who have the Jesus is king banner outside of

the rooms, or I've seen one with a truck that flies behind his car.

And obviously they're making a political statement, which is also the original intent of this idea.

And it cuts against the grain of everything that we as our modern society believes.

So this is a difficult word for us. So what we've done is we've softened it

and we've made it mean something else instead of what it intended to mean. And that is master.

And I just want to give, before we get into, I just have two main points for us today.

Before we get to that, I want to give you a little bit of a clue to unlocking

the scriptures as you read them.

So there are our translators, our English versions have done the work for us if we pay attention.

And part of scripture is learning to notice what we're actually reading.

So whenever you see Lord show up in your Bibles, and it's all lowercase,

L-O-R-D, all lowercase,

that is usually translated, especially in the Old Testament,

it's translated from this word Adon.

And that can simply mean a Lord in the broadest sense in the terms usually of

a human being as a Lord or a master.

And it's used for God a few times, but mostly it just refers to human masters,

human rulers, human stewards, one who's placed in authority over a house or

a manor or a people. And we can think of Joseph, right?

So Joseph became an Adon in Egypt.

But before that, when Joseph was having his dreams and he was going to tell

his family about it, and they got really angry about him,

what he was sharing with them, as he said that essentially you and all my brothers

and you and my father, you're going to bow down before me.

What he's sharing with them is this Adon relationship. And that's why they got upset with him.

Because he is sharing this lordship, this idea that he was going to be lord

and master over top of him.

And this is singular and it's delegated to humans as authority.

Sometimes in our English Bibles, you'll see the word lord in all capital, L-O-R-D, all capitals.

This is always the name Yahweh or Yehovah.

So the Bible often translates, pretty much always translates Yahweh as lord, all capitals.

And so this is the covenant name of God. We spent time talking about what that

is, that God revealed to Moses as the I am, but there's so much more depth in

there, the all existing one, the creator of heaven and earth,

the one who owns everything.

So sometimes you'll see it like that. Other times you'll see Lord in the middle

of a sentence, capital L, and then O-R-D in lower cases.

So when you see that, that is the word in the Old Testament,

Adonai in the New Testament, Kyrgios. And what that is communicating,

this is used for God alone, this word.

And what you'll see is it's communicating something special.

So we see in Psalm chapter eight, which I read a few weeks ago,

O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

O Lord Yahweh, O Yahweh, our Adonai, how majestic is your name in all the earth.

Oftentimes, so the word Adonai in the Old Testament appears about 449 times

and 315, There's 315 of those,

so three quarters of them are always, three quarters of them are shared with

Yahweh, the Lord our God is how we might translate it, or, O Lord,

our Lord, Yahweh and Yehovah and Adonai together.

And what that is doing is intensifying and emphasizing His sovereignty,

His authority, His ownership, His right to rule.

In Psalm 24, it says that the earth is the Lord's and everything in it.

In 1 Corinthians 10, it says that the, what does it say?

The earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof, right? It's quoting that Psalm.

It communicates this idea of ownership and authority.

And if God is the owner, the implication of that is that you are not.

I am not. And so what's also fascinating about specifically the word Adonai

is that it is a plural word.

Adon is a singular, Adonai is a plural. And we could say that it's looking to

some sort of preview into the Trinity.

And that might be true. In its simplicity, what it's doing is simply giving

that idea of lordship to the utmost degree, to the nth degree.

Not only is he a lord and a great lord, but he is lord of lords.

He is master of masters. He is sovereign above everything.

And so this name Adonai belongs exclusively to God in its fullest sense.

And then when we get to the New Testament, it's no longer this word Adonai because

it's written in Greek and non-Hebrew. It is the word Kyrios.

And this is a broader, it's less specific than the different Hebrew words that we use.

However, it's important that Kyrios is the second most used title for Jesus

in the entirety of the New Testament,

that he is called Lord more than anything else other than Christ.

Christ is the only other title that is used more than Lord.

And Paul writes in Philippians Therefore, God exalted him, Jesus,

to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,

that every tongue should acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord.

And so that name that is above every name is not the name Jesus,

it is the name Lord that God gave

and shared because Jesus is part of the Trinity, that Lordship with him.

And that confession that Jesus is Lord is not just simply saying that Jesus is great.

It is saying in that term that Jesus is curious, it is adopting all of that

Old Testament language that Jesus is Adonai, that Jesus is master and every

name will bow before him.

This is why the most quoted Old Testament scripture in the New Testament is Psalm 110.

That is the most quoted scripture from the Old Testament within the New Testament.

And that says, the Lord says to my Lord, sit at my right hand.

The Lord Yahweh says to my Lord, Kurios Adonai, sit at my right hand.

Because the apostles understood that this is talking about Jesus.

And they understood, they were slow to understand, but they eventually understood

that this was the most important relationship that they could have.

That Jesus is not merely their teacher. He's not merely a prophet.

He's not merely their savior. He is all of those things, but he is also Lord and master.

And here's where the two things that make lordship not overbearing, but a beautiful idea.

Because God is Lord, because he is Adonai, what Adonai owns, he takes care of.

This is the foundational idea of a master and servant relationship.

And that's what a true master does because he owns everything,

everybody. He's responsible for that, which he owns.

He's not distance, distant from what he belongs to him. He's not careless with what belongs to him.

He does not abandon what belongs to him. He takes ownership and with ownership

comes responsibility, right?

Spider-Man quote with great. What does it say? Power becomes great responsibility.

There's no greater power. So there's no greater responsibility than with Jesus.

And so what Adonai owns, he takes care of.

I love, there's that picture in the New Testament and it shows up in Luke chapter

eight, where the disciples are on the boat and Jesus is sleeping underneath, right?

And it's the moment where Jesus comes up and calms the storm and they marvel and are at all.

And they say, what kind of man is this that even the wind and the waves obey him?

And in that moment, in their fear, they come to Jesus and they say,

master, master, don't you care that we are perishing?

They don't call him teacher, which they do sometimes. They don't call him by

any other name that they could have possibly called him.

But in that moment, there's this understanding that ultimately the master is

responsible to take care of the servant.

So they say, don't you care that your servants are dying?

You should do something about it. You're responsible for us.

If we belong to him, then our lives are not resting firmly in our own hands

and our own control and our own ability, but they're resting in his.

And this is what, if we look through the whole Bible, is what Abram learns.

This is what Moses learns. This is what Peter learns.

This is what every surrendered life eventually learns, that what Adonai owns, Adonai takes care of.

The master is responsible for the servant.

The other thing is, the other thing before we get to the two points.

Scripture presses this relationship even further, over and over again in the New Testament.

Romans chapter 1, Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

Philippians chapter 1, Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ.

Philippians 1 · chapter mention

Titus chapter 1, Paul, a servant of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ.

Titus 1 · chapter mention

Galatians 1, if we're still trying to please people, I would not be a servant of Christ.

James gets in on it. James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ,

which is especially striking because James is the brother of Jesus.

And yet, in the end, though he didn't worship him while he was alive,

he becomes known as and calls himself, identifies himself as his servant, not his brother.

Peter says, Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ.

Jude, a servant of Christ and brother of James.

Again, he identifies himself as his servant before any family connection,

but also completely neglecting his family connection to Jesus.

We get to John in the book of Revelation, this revelation from Jesus Christ,

which God gave him to show to his servants, which is all of us.

The end of Revelation, the throne of God and the lamb will be in the city and

his servants will serve him. That's what servants do.

And we just have all of these other iterations. In 1 Corinthians chapter seven,

he who is free when he is called is Christ's slave.

Ephesians six, as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart.

Colossians 3, it is the Lord Christ you are serving.

So this idea, I belong to him. I do what he says.

The disciples, it seems like they were most willing and ready to identify themselves

before they talked about themselves being children of God, before they talked

about themselves being a friend of Jesus,

before they talked about themselves, even in this familiar relationship of brother

or sister, they saw themselves as owned.

As servants of the most high God, as slaves of God.

And when we are called to surrender ourselves as servants of God,

as slaves of God, Paul uses, they use that word slaves,

even though that is a word that we would love to just erase from history.

They embrace it wholeheartedly.

Paul writes in Romans 8, We are debtors, not to the flesh, for those who are

led by the Spirit of God are sons of God.

And so he sets up this relationship of us being debtors, but we're not debtors to the flesh anymore.

Flesh has no, cannot help. It has no hope. There's nothing good there.

Instead, we are debtors to the Spirit of God and those who are led by the Spirit

of God, where the Spirit tells you to go, you say, I do what you say and I go.

And we're called sons of God.

In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, Paul writes that those who are called in the Lord

1 Corinthians 7 · chapter mention

as slaves is a freedman. Let me read that.

He who was called in the Lord as a slave, so we're slaves to sin,

is a freedman of the Lord. Then he turns it around.

Likewise, he who was free when called is Christ's slave.

And so he creates this paradox in 1 Corinthians 7 and in the book of Romans, where he's,

We experience our freedom as we recognize our ownership.

We experience joy and happiness because we're finally free as we become servants of Christ.

And if you thought you were free apart from him, you were never really free

at all because everybody serves something.

And that's why Jesus says you cannot serve two masters.

Everyone has a Lord. Everyone serves a master. The only question is who owns you?

So I want you to think about that question. Who owns you?

And here are the two, the two points for today that we're just going to talk

about and let us sit with you and give a challenge.

The first is that you can know God as savior and you can even confess him as

Lord, but he can never, he can still not be master of your life.

It's possible for no, to know God as Yahweh, to know God as Savior,

even to confess him as Lord, and for him to still not be master of your life.

This one's going to get weird, but follow me.

Are you guys familiar with the story of Balaam in the book of Numbers?

So Balaam is a prophet, but he's not a prophet of God.

He works for hire to the highest bidder.

And he's kind of like in the surrounding, he's not a Canaanite,

but he's in those surrounding countries.

And so when...

The king comes and hires Balaam.

What he's hiring to do is to curse the people of Israel because he's afraid.

They've all heard about what God has done in Egypt.

And now this great multitude has come on his doorstep and he doesn't want them

to do anything to his country.

So he hires Balaam to come and curse the people of Israel.

And so he's this pagan prophet for hire, spiritual mercenary, if you want.

And I guess the king's name is B-L-A-K. I think that's what it is.

It's not Barak. That's what keeps coming in my mind, probably because, you know.

So Balaam is hired to curse Israel, but God interrupts this whole process.

And eventually, God does permit him to go, but he kind of puts this warning on him.

He tells him initially, do not go with them. You must not put a curse on these

people because they are blessed.

But eventually he's permitted to go with the king.

And he's gone with this caveat that he can only speak what God has given him to speak.

And this becomes over and over

again, Balaam's repeated confession as they continually ask him to curse.

And then he blesses them and they're confused and upset. And he says over and

over again, I must speak only what God has put in my mouth.

Must I not speak only what the Lord puts in my mouth.

Again, I must speak only what the Lord says. So these are three different moments

that Balaam has led to different parts of the country so that he can look over

Israel and pronounce a curse on them.

And that curse always rebounds into a blessing.

And we know that Balaam isn't a prophet of God because during this course of

action, it even says that he

didn't have to rely on divination anymore because God was speaking to him.

So he's not used to hearing the voice of the Lord.

And every time he says that I could only do what God says, it really sounds

to us like what he's saying is, God is Adonai, I must do what he says.

But Adonai never shows up in this story. It is always Yehovah that shows up

in the story, never Adonai.

So no matter what Balaam is saying to our ears, he's never confessing the master-servant

relationship of Adonai.

Which helps us a little bit because I always get a few chapters later and then

these nations are wiped out and it says that Balaam was wiped out with them.

And in this story, in this moment, we can think that Balaam is a servant of

Yahweh, that he is a servant of Adonai, that he is a prophet of the Most High God.

But none of that is really what's happening here.

Even to the point that we get down to Deuteronomy chapter 23,

Deuteronomy 23 · chapter mention

and it clarifies this for us.

It says that the Lord God would not listen to Balaam, but turned the curse into

a blessing for you because the Lord your God loves you.

So this story about Balaam is not ultimately about Balaam's obedience to God

in this master-servant relationship that we want to read into it.

Ultimately, it is about God overruling Balaam's intentions.

It's about the fact that God turns cursing into blessing.

That God is still master of the moment, even though God is not Balaam's master.

Balaam never changed. We don't see some transformation arc in his story.

He goes back to divination and back to his spiritual warfare for hire.

He heard God's voice probably for the first time. He experiences God's power.

He knows God's word. He knows God's blessing, but because he never surrenders

lordship to him, God was never truly his master.

And so it becomes less surprising that he is destroyed along with the rest of

the nation because you can know God as Jehovah, you can know God as Elohim and

you can still not recognize him as Adonai, as Lord, Master, as Owner.

Which is exactly why Jesus comes along in the New Testament and says more plainly

for us not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven,

that you can worship God, you

can sing his praises is you can confess his lordship and still be far off.

Again, Jesus says in the parable of the foolish builder, right?

The builders who build their house on the sand, those who build their house

on the rock, the ones who built their house on the sand, when the wind and waves

come, the house is washed away.

And Jesus says in that story, why at the beginning of that story,

before he tells it, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say?

That this is the dividing line between those who worship Yahweh and those who

understand Him as Adonai.

It's whether you do what he says or not. Not surprisingly, the Pharisees completely

miss this over and over again.

When they're challenged, they come back at Jesus and they say,

we are Abraham's descendants, that we've never had anyone rule over us.

We've never been a slave to anyone.

I guess they didn't know their own history. They were certainly slaves in Egypt.

They were servants in Assyria. Even now in Roman occupied Jerusalem,

they were still under the authority of another one, but also it reveals a deeper

spiritual posture that they have that same idea that we have in our culture.

No one is master over me. We are God's chosen people.

And this is the human heart apart from surrender, no master above me.

But Adonai means that God is master. I belong to you. I do what you say.

Second point for us. First point, you can know God and never make him Lord.

You can hear him, you can speak about him. You can even be around his activities

and still never surrender to him as Adonai. But here's the second truth.

And this is the good news. This is the great news. When you know God as Adonai,

when you surrender to him as master,

when you recognize and confess him as Lord and the truth and depths of your

heart, he unleashes his blessing and his divine will on you.

And through you. And so God is waiting for our surrender, for our undivided

belief, for our undeterred faith, for our full surrender to do something incredible in our lives.

You know, that word incredible, it means unable to be believed, right?

And essentially, God wants to do something in you that only He can do,

not that you can do under your own power and your own strength.

He is just waiting for you to stop being, trying to be the master of your own

life and for you to make yourself available to him,

to surrender to him, for you to fall before him as the Lord and say,

what you say I'm going to do, you are master of my life.

We have that passage in Romans chapter 12, which many of you probably know by

Romans 12 · chapter mention

heart as soon as I start saying Therefore, I urge you, my brothers and sisters,

in view of God's mercy to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,

holy and pleasing to God.

God says, give me your life, lay it at my feet, come to me as your holy Lord

and master and see what I can do.

God allows us to live, for some reason, God allows us to live with the illusion

of control, but he's waiting for us to fall on our faces before him.

It's that repetition that we see, Yahweh Adonai, the Lord, my God.

Well, we can call this the special agency of God.

So when scripture speaks about God working in the world, what it often reveals

is this pattern that God chooses to accomplish his purpose through surrendered people.

Not because he needs them. God doesn't need surrendered people.

God uses Balaam, but God unleashes his special agency through his people,

through surrendered people, because it is his delight to work with surrendered people.

And what we see is over and over again, just want to run through the stories,

but we can become instruments that he can actually use without resistance.

When we stop trying to do things for God in our own strength and instead begin

to be used by God and his strength as our master.

When we say, Lord, what do you want? What do you want from me?

Before I start in the old Testament, Acts chapter nine, Paul's conversion story, right?

In that God says to him, arise and I will tell you what to do.

And then from there on, we see the life surrendered, doing what God has asked

him to do over and over again. Lord, what do you want me to do?

Alignment with God and God's special agency. So here's the pattern.

Whenever somebody talks about Adonai, usually what they go to is Genesis chapter

Genesis 15 · chapter mention

15, where Abraham believed the Lord and he credited to him his righteousness.

So in that confession, Abraham, God said, I'm going to bless you.

Your descendants are going to be greater, more outnumber the stars.

And Abraham believes God. In his faith, he still is allowed to ask how?

Essentially, when he comes to God and says, he confesses him as Lord Yahweh,

Lord Adonai, the Lord, my God, the Lord, our Lord.

He confesses that lordship, that master relationship.

And then he asks God, hey, you're master.

You're responsible. This is your promise. This is your blessing.

I don't see how it's going to happen because this servant in my household,

Eliezer, he's going to be my heir.

So if you're a master, if you're Lord, you're responsible. You have to take

care of this. He confesses that relationship and God says, no,

it's going to be through your own son.

So faith becomes the doorway to promise as Abraham confesses that master-servant relationship.

In Moses, in Exodus chapter 14, we give Moses a bad time, right?

Exodus 14 · chapter mention

Because he always says, send somebody else.

I can't speak well. I can't do this. I'm not worthy. Send somebody else.

But then there's this turning point.

Even as he asks that, he confesses that name Yahweh or the name Adonai in it.

He says, pardon your servant, Lord, Adonai, please send someone else.

He gets broken down to this point where he realizes that actually it's God's

decision to send him and he's master.

So there's this confession, even though it's a reluctance surrender,

we see a man who is like, send somebody else.

I can't do it to a man that says, oh, wait, your master.

Can you please send somebody else?

And then a life of saying, you are master. I do what you say.

In Judges 6, we see Gideon and Gideon does a similar thing where he's like, I can't do this.

My clan's the weakest of all of Israel and I'm the least in my family.

Even so, there is this turning point where Gideon confesses that name to the Lord.

He calls him Adonai and he surrenders to his lordship, his master authority.

And God uses him to deliver his people. And God doesn't need the strength of Gideon.

That's the whole point of that story. He needs surrender. He needs his yielded weakness.

Isaiah chapter six, Isaiah says, here I am, send me.

There's this whole confession of relationship through this story.

We're not going to read it, but where God uses the one who is confronted with

his glory and falls at his feet as Lord and master." Joshua,

when he leads the people into,

the promised land, there's this battle where some angels and stuff show up.

Angels and stuff, it's really biblical term.

And Joshua's like, are you for us? Are you for them?

And they're like, no, that's the response. It's like, you don't understand.

And it says the angels' response is that. Neither. They say it better than that.

But he says, as the commander of the army of the Lord, I now have come.

And his confession is there is the Lord. I do what he says.

I'm not for you and I'm not for them. I am the Lord's and I do what he says.

That's the confession of this angel to Joshua.

So the question shifts from, is God on my side?

For Joshua, as this military leader is, oh, am I on his side?

This is how God operates transactionally. So maybe I need to reconsider my thought

pattern here. Am I on his side?

Luke chapter five, this beautiful submission. I just read this a couple, like a week or two ago.

Jesus, they've been fishing all night. Jesus steps into the boat during the

day. They lead him out a little bit further. He teaches all the people. we know the story.

And then Jesus says, let down your nets. And Peter's like, we've been fishing

all night and we didn't catch anything.

And in Luke, in the NIV version, how it translates it is that he says,

because you say so, I will let down the nets.

And this is the simple surrender in the moment, the impossible breaks open.

When God is Adonai, something beautiful happens. He's not restricted in what He wants to do.

We're not trying to take authority away from Him. We're no longer asking God to bless our plans.

We're becoming the kind of people that He can flow His plans through.

God takes care of us as our master.

He provides for us. And as we surrender our hearts, it is just the indicator

for him to unleash his divine agency in us.

Like, what are we still holding on to?

Julie's going to come and share a testimony about this in our own life and her

encounter with the Lord, a master.

Before I share, I just want to ask, like, as a body, like, would somebody pray

for me? I feel like extremely under attack at the moment, and just came for crying.

Oh, God, I left it to you. You know, I even put it to me. I swear to you.

I'll just pray. God, please.

That is not for attention.

That is, I need the body in that moment. I need the body.

So I'm actually not going to share exactly what I thought I was going to share,

but I just want to invite you into an experience with me.

Probably 10 years ago, the Lord heard somebody share this vision of the Lord

being just on the throne of your life.

And so I'm going to kind of tell you that, and then I want to invite you into

that experience with me.

So he painted the picture of, I think he actually used Star Trek,

of the control panel, you know, and Captain Curt, and Captain Curt didn't sit

at the control panel like people on the ship did. And so he was the commanding officer.

And so for me, the vision that comes to my mind is actually Crimson Tide,

the movie Crimson Tide. It was probably my first, like, what,

90s, late 90s, early 2000s when it came out of a submarine and how the chain of command worked.

And so with that chain of command, you have the same kind of thing of what he

painted the picture of Star Trek of the commanding officer, the CO and the con,

the controlling officer.

Of like the controlling officer was the one who actually him

and the people he you know was over the ones that

are actually having to make the decision push the button

for you know the nuclear weapon to go so and so i see that kind of in my life

of the lord i actually got to share this last night probably the first time

i was faced with surrendering my control because for those of you who know me.

I'm a little controlling. I like to plan.

I like knowledge. I like information. I like to know what's going on.

And that determines the direction of my life. But that.

So when you have a child and you realize, oh, I can't control anything.

That was probably when I had Brianna was probably the first time I was like,

Lord, I need you. Like I needed him for other things.

But it was the time that I felt like every bit of control was ripped from me and that I could not,

like I didn't have the ability to do what was needed to be done to raise her

and then raise Maddie into a citizen of kingdom. That was his responsibility.

So there's many times in my life that the things I thought I had control over,

the Lord ripped control of those things so that I would surrender that to Him

and so submit to His Lordship.

And so for just a minute, I'm just going to sit down. And so close your eyes

with me for a minute, and I'm just going to just guide you.

Lord, I pray that you just take this wherever you want to with each person.

Meet them where they're at, or give them a vision of what it looks like to submit to your Lordship.

So Lord, I pray that you show each of us what the control panel in front of us looks like.

Early on in this vision, for me, my control panel had lots of knobs,

lots of things over here, you know, reaching left, right, all around.

So what does your control panel look like? Where are the things,

what are the plates that you have spinning in your life?

And if it's easier, I have a vision of the movie Inside Out in my mind as well,

with the control panel and all the emotions and all the things grasping for

control and fighting over who's going to.

Going to be the one that's like controlling everything and lord

i pray that you give us a vision of what it looks like for you to

be lord and master the one who has

power authority and control over our

lives show us what you look like as our commanding officer

lord show show us what you sound

like what does your voice sound like behind

us giving us giving us information giving

us guidance giving us wisdom and as the lord has spoken to me over the years

about him being lord over my life my troll panel now looks like a simple kid's

toy i have a knob over here that i can turn to say yes i choose to be in your

word yes i choose to sit in your presence.

The handle over here that goes up and down, it says, yes, I will love you and

I will love people. Sometimes it looks better than others.

I have another place where it says yes to community and yes to being on mission with God.

Now, there's lots of decisions that are not included in that,

but as a whole, everything flows through that of love God with all your heart,

soul, mind, and strength and loving others and being on mission with Him and

doing all that in community.

So, Lord, I ask that you solidify that picture for us of what it looks like

for you to be, Lord, a master of our life.

Lord, I ask that you build our trust, build our faith in you,

build our faith in your voice, build our faith in the immediate obedience that you asked us for, Lord.

And the trust that when we hear your voice, that we know there are good things there.

And, Lord, I pray that we don't see this as a restricting thing.

In 2 Corinthians, I think 3, it says, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

There's freedoms. I've talked about this a couple of times. So when you sit

and you see your control panel, Lord, I pray that you show us what it looks

like to not be spinning on the plates, to not be touching and doing everything

quickly because we feel like everything's going to fall apart if we don't.

Lord, show us what freedom looks like sitting there. Show us what it looks like

to have confidence in you as Master and Lord over our life.

Thank you for what you've given us this morning. Thank you for the visions that

you've given me in this room.

I claim that in the faith that you've shown somebody what that looks like.

The more we ask that you continue to do that.

Amen. Just keep your eyes closed for a little bit.

I know that as Julie was sharing, there's a passage in Jeremiah.

I think it's one of Sarah Dearborn's favorite passages.

She can either deny it or confirm it, but talks about showing us the ancient

ways that our master will be behind us, whispering in our ears the way that we should walk.

That God is gentle as he leads us as our master. He's not overbearing.

He's not insensitive to our plight in this earthly realm.

We have a high priest who has experienced life on this world to its fullest

and yet remained sinless.

So God identifies with us and as our master, he is gentle.

I just want us to sit with those questions in that posture for a moment.

And Bree, if you want to come and start playing.

Because this idea is that we

don't listen to God as much as we think we do or as much as we should do.

So I want us just to meditate in this time as we head into response by singing,

as we head into response by remembrance and communion.

Meditate on what is God actually asking of us?

Not just us singularly and not just us, generally speaking, God wants us to

love our neighbor. God wants to love him.

What's specifically in your life?

I just have this picture always when we talk about the spirit of God moving

in our lives, we have those verses fanning into flame.

I think the college students say something like, I want to be a fire,

not a flame or something like that.

We think about God working in our lives and fanning that flame into a roaring fire.

We always want him to work in certain areas. God, I want you to deal with this

in my life. I want you to help me here.

I think a lot of times the stuff that we keep behind the closed door that we're

not ready for, that we say, God, you can't touch this yet. Those are the places

that God wants to work first.

So if you want him to work in the other spots, surrender to him as your master

in those areas and watch him transform the rest.

So what is it that you've been hiding away, refusing to let God touch,

to be master of in your life?

Cause that's the place where God wants to work right now. So what is it for you?

What does it actually, what does God actually want?

This comes with a warning in my experience James

it says that uh bless her it talks about being doers of the word and not hearers

only in my experience Julie talked about this control planner that says yes

and no essentially my experience is the more I say no to God the more distance

is what distant his voice becomes.

If I keep telling God no over and over again, my perspective,

my experience, it's not necessarily reality, but my experience becomes that he stops asking. Okay.

Train ourselves. Every time we say, no, I'm not going to go talk to that person.

I'm not going to pray for them. I'm not going to give money to this.

No, I'm not going to go do that. No, I'm not going to go out of my way of what

I've planned to go and do this thing that you've called me to.

The more we say, no, I feel my experience is that I've just trained myself to

ignore the times that God's asking me for a yes.

The beautiful thing is that when we surrender,

God allows our ears to hear those requests again.

So don't train yourself to say no. Don't let the last thing that you ever said

to the Lord of all of heaven and earth be no.

So what is he actually asking of you?

Where have you been saying, no, I want to lead my own life. I want to be ruler of my own life.

And then meditate on what does it mean for you to confess that Jesus is Lord,

that God is master in your life right now.

And don't let that,

don't let this activity of prayer and meditation fall because we stopped doing

it and said, amen on a Sunday. and we started singing a song.

Let this be the meditation of our hearts throughout the week.

What is God asking of you? What does it mean for me to confess him as Lord and master?

One last thing. If you want to stand with me.

Can we just make that confession together? That Jesus is Lord.

That God is master. Those two phrases.

You say it with me. Do I need to count?

One two three Jesus is Lord God.